How to Tell a Real 1959 Gibson Les Paul Guitar From a Fake
wsj.com
wsj.com
It's true that I don't think you could find a decent acoustic guitar for anywhere near that price. I recently paid $500 for my first acoustic because I saw a clear difference in quality between the one I selected (Taylor GS Mini) and the competition in the $200-$400 price range.
I have one of the last Korean Ibanezes(2005) before production of mid and low end models was almost entirely moved to Indonesia, and in 2006 the Korean ones were much better in comparison.
Nowadays, after almost 15 years the Indonesian made Ibanezes caught up.
Another guitar I use regularly is a Squier Bullet Strat. It sounds kind of like Strat and it doesn't buzz at frets because of super high action, but it won't stay in tune, the ends frets are sharp and so are saddle adjustment screws that are a couple of millimeters too long and the icing on the cake is that basically anything played on second string makes something under pickguard rattle unless you press it at a certain spot. If you have to ask, it's audible through pickups and kills sustain.
I think you can find equally bad USA-made instruments at several times of the price if you look hard enough, but I wouldn't call these good instruments.
Back in the 80s I bought a Charvel (Japanese) as I couldn't afford a Jackson (US made) - the cheaper Floyd Rose tremolo was disappointing but it was fine to play. Eventually switched to an Ibanez RG 570 which was super nice to play.
The type and grade of wood used will also affect the string vibration and what overtone frequencies are refected back into the strings. It takes 20-40 years to mature a mahogany tree so while your boutique makers will spend the time to source the perfect timber you won't get that for a mass produced guitar.
There are guitarists who swear by their guitar tech who will adjust everything from bridge height, neck tension, even reseat and glue the neck before they pick it up the first time. I pulled the neck off my old Charvel more than once to get a lower, more even string height along the fretboard. Second time I filed back a few frets that had nicks or weren't quite evenly set and sanded the epoxy coating off the neck and replaced with shellac for a smoother raw wood feel.
It sounds more than okay (which is subjective). The body is light but without any head dive present. The neck is a dream and the fretwork is impeccable.
The tuners are bad but not awful. That's the only bad thing I can say about it.
stage 1: figure out how to make a thing
stage 2: figure out how to make the thing well
stage 3: figure out how to make the thing cheaply
stage 4: figure out how to make the thing well, cheaply
I'd say that for electric guitars, the '59 Les Paul was at the early end of stage 2, and sometime in the last decade or so we've gradually transitioned into stage 4.
One might argue that there's also a stage 5: figure out how to make the thing well and cheap, but customized to a specific user's preferences. Right now, that's the main reason why one would have an electric guitar custom made by a luthier rather than buy a factory-made instrument. (I like to mess around with just-intonation-based tuning systems, and have ended up building or modifying a lot of instruments simply because guitars in the tunings I want simply aren't for sale.)
Many guitarists fetishize the 59 Les Paul because of the sound. The trick is that '59 Les Paul might not sound any different objectively, but the musician knows they are playing an iconic and rare instrument. This can make the musician play better than usual. Guitarists often attribute this to the "mojo" in the guitar; the trick is the mojo is in the player's belief.
On the other hand, I could see that for some successful performers, the purchase could be a sound financial investment if fans are just a bit more excited about hearing their favorite musician playing a rare instrument live than they would otherwise be. One might be able to recover the purchase price of the instrument through increased ticket sales.
I once turned up to a pub session and saw this hairy-looking person with a complete PoS no-name guitar. It had holes in the body and looked like it was held together with tape.
Even so. Surprisingly good sound. Sweet playing.
Complete opposite to the guitar nerds who turn up with gleaming prestige instruments they fumble around on.
I found out afterwards he'd been in a household name UK pop band in the late 60s.
[edit] I think it might have been a Fender Jaguar actually, it looked terrible!
Hey now, the neck on the Gibson SG is wonderful.
I've owned both and personally strongly prefer the SG. It doesn't have the same iconic image as the Les Paul, though.
But personally I'm just not a fan of the shorter scale lengths and thick gloss finishes on most Gibsons, I'm personally a fan of thinner maple necks and will sand down the finish myself if I have to, but everyone's different
Oh I am too. Most of the time I play a Fender. But I love playing an SG also.
[1] https://www.lespaulforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83971-Jimm...
(Disclaimer: worked in the MI business for decades. It always fills me with a sense of wonder, the things people will buy to make themselves sound different from others while also conforming to industry expectations...)
Because that link may not work forever - although I suspect it will be there for a while - the summary is: two Telecaster guitars painted to look like copies of the Teles Jimmy Page played in Led Zeppelin. Signed by Jimmy Page. £44,999.
I'd love to know what the shop markup is on those, or if they're on sale-or-return.
Synthesizers have a similar scene. An official Keith Emerson Moog Modular Replica reissue a few years ago was being sold for >$100k. (Note to those under 40: Keith Emerson was a famous/notorious rock keyboardist in the 1970s.)
It doesn't have to be a 'classic' synthesiser to command extraordinary markup/profit.
There is a reason why the current synthesiser market is vibrant and active and virulent - and nobody is playing well with each other, there are more competing platforms to do the same thing than many other spaces.
That reason is, you can spend $100 on a BOM-per-product, and sell it for 5 figures, year after year. That $3000 synth workstation, at scale, can add up to a lot of real, good old fashioned atom-based commercialisation.
I'd say they were pretty expensive to produce:
> And these 2 pieces were masterfully built by Paul Waller at the Fender Custom Shop under the discerning eye of Page. They are exact re-creations of his beloved guitars!
It certainly amazes me what some hobbyists can spend without playing a single gig, or even understanding the kit they have, but I guess it's a hobby.
As to professionals if they decide it's worth it to their bottom line I wouldn't call them consumers.
There is a distinction in the market between professionals and hobbyists, but then most of the MI market is borne on the fact that there are about 2 - 10 million new musician students coming into the scene every year - a portion will become hobbyists, and a very, very small percentage will become 'professionals', by many variant degrees of definition of the word professional - i.e. gets paid, has money to spend on music stuff.
Musicians can be pro or hobbyist, doesn't matter to the instrument maker unless its important the end user feels special. Thus, the higher prices for 'special' instruments.
Music, though, doesn't need to be high quality in order to be experienced. Even low quality instruments can sound amazing in the hands of a musician - hobbyist or otherwise.
My brother teaches guitar and he frequently sees people who’ve just started playing show up for lessons with ludicrously expensive instruments. And hey, if they enjoy it, more power to them.
Imagine owning this ledger and charging per request for validation.
Of course, if it's about the contents then a forgery would be impossible to make.
But he was a fairly high end player as his group had a residency at the Balmoral during the Edinburgh festival
No one can tell the difference, besides by using techniques like a ledger or scientific analysis. Both can be easily tricked by anyone involved. This means your perception of those items is strongly colored by completely external "facts" (rather, assumptions based on your trust into experts, at best). We could show the countless tourists that want to see her a replicated Mona Lisa and no one would ever be able to tell. Yet if we'd tell them there'd be at least a small outroar.
All of this is really off putting. Reminds me of placebo. And being emotionally invested in sports teams.
I would suggest that this is because you place no value on the act of creation, the creative genius that pulls the artifact out of thin air into the material world. The view you are describing is purely utilitarian.
The counterfeiter is stealing that creative value, without which the artifact they are manufacturing isn’t possible.
Brands have history, and we're emotionally tied to it. It's how we work, it's how part of our decision making process works and it's quite efficient.
Even if your argument will be : "NONSENSE! I only buy reliable items that perform their practical duties with their practical properties." I'm pretty sure those items are tied to a brand that worked hard to own the title of having reliable items that perform how they are supposed to perform.
Collectibles is just another form of having a piece of that. Can be fueled by nostalgia, or something practical like a specific sound or texture, could be a story you relate to, etc.
But while writing this I did some introspection and realized that I would also buy all the name & brand based expensive stuff there is if I had the money for it. So my negative feelings are probably just jealousy at this (from my perspective) frivolous waste of money. So, nevermind. (-;
From my experience, it's bad if exploited but there's little benefits of lying to/tricking people and defraud their expectations.
In fact I'm pretty sure you (and I, and everyone) have plenty of brands that destroyed our trust in them and we would NEVER buy from them again - either because you had bad customer service, or they wasted your time to deliver a bad product/experience... so it's not a good practice to manipulate and lie to people, it will only work in the short term, but it does happen.
We don't do well we betrayal.
But for example, for fine art collection, people can do it simply because they like and artist body of work and see value in it, others because it would fit their collection (because they might be trying to get a slice of a specific artistic movement), others because they believe it's where art is moving to (represents a form a progress), other because their art dealer told them it's a good investment and the artist is growing in specific circles... I've been trying to help an artist with marketing, and it's not easy at all.
It may sound like non-sense, but fine art should be more present in our lives, and surround us, even if it's for something as simple as "I like this paint"!
Art connects us with history. If we don't have a conscious stream going back to the Greek mathematicians such as Archimedes and Erastosthenes, how do we know they existed? In this case we actually don't have a nice conscious stream because of a little event called the fall of Rome and the dark ages. But the artifacts are as real a connection to early history as my school books with my writing are to my own early history, or yours.
Anything connecting us directly to the Renaissance is inherently valuable, as is the Romantic era, or early industrial history. I value van Gogh for it's place in history, and for the fact that anything in the painting has to be from that date. If you do some kind of verification, you should see that the green pigment has to be the one that they used at that time, and may possibly look a bit faded to a more yellowy colour. Red pigment will probably be somewhat poisonous and blue may well be from a particular plant with a particular name. (IANAAH.)
Going to the Renaissance is of course more complicated than going to van Gogh, going to the dark ages is more so, and even more so going back to Greece. The same holds for any civilisations such as the Maya, ancient China, Mesopotamia, and so forth. We are connected to the San only through very few artifacts and often they are too generic to know. We are but limited to paintings on overhanging rock faces.
The money value is another argument, but if I had the money, I would buy a piece of history for $1m in the same way that I would buy a Fazioli or a Bosendorfer (the one with the octave lower, of course) for some $200k, new or old.
Some person (or group of persons) crafted this thing.
Some small subset of the original purchasers valued the thing enough to preserve it.
In almost any situation, given freedom from financial constraints and all other factors being equal, anybody is going to choose the original thing over the reproduction.
I've seen a bunch of articles the past years, in websites like WSJ, where they've started to ride the vintage guitars/amps "investment" wagon. I know the vintage community hates this notion - because for every Joe B that actually plays the instruments, there are probably 10 collectors that just stow away the instruments in safe storage.
Furthermore, you need to either be incredibly experienced yourself, or find some person that really, really knows their sh!t. Fakes can of course be a huge problem, especially if they're high-end replicas from over the years.
But IMO the biggest risk would be pieces that simply aren't original. There's quite a difference between an original burst, and some conversion burst. Both only one of them will yield extraordinary good ROI.
This is what I was going to ask you: what about the modifications?
One quite famous LP is the one from Jimmy Page, and I think that when he bought it either it came with a wider neck, or he changed it after getting it - one thing is sure, it wasn't the original neck. Plus he had many other mods. This would devalue a lot the guitar no?
If that happens, and it belonged to a super star, then it will get the value as an item from the super star, and not the item itself?
It's just odd the perceived value of collectibles - some people value the story behind items, others love the story of the item itself, others do it because they think it's a good investment. But when it comes to guitars, despite the history of Gibson, I'm pretty sure any '59 LP that reached 2020 must have a hell of a story to tell, with mods or no mods - unless it stood in a former studio player attic getting dust.
Often times a pickups has been re-wound, pots have been swapped out, or what not. If you own a bone stock burst these days, you'll take it to luthiers that specialize on this kind of stuff - but back in the 70s, people didn't really give it much thought. Sure, they were valuable and collectible already back then, but not to the degree we see today - so people just modded / repaired them without much thought.
If some celeb has owned a guitar, then there's some inherent "bonus" on that - or at least, the value won't drop.
Now, if it's some regular Burst with no celeb history, that has new pickups and tuners - then that's probably going to take a good hit on the price.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w86Jym1eZCI
What the hell, here's Jimmy on his, Since I've Been Lovin' You (Bonham finally oiled his bass pedal):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZiN_NqT-Us
The full collection:
https://festivalpeak.com/https-medium-com-davisjames-guitar-...
He played it for the rest of his life and never told anybody what it was.
Also a bit from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11313030
Edit: honestly, I first thought "hey, that would be a cool name", then I wrote the comment above, then I googled it and found out that yes, there is actually a Finnish metal band founded in 1984 with this name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratovarius But yeah, I guess the name is too good to not be already taken...
This claim has been made about other instruments, for example people have claimed a Stradivarius violin can be identified by a professional who knows what to look for. When tested in a blind study, the professionals preferred newer instruments more often than not. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/04/elite-violinists-fai...
There is vale in the name though and particularly when they were still producing a quality product.
Nobody can tell a $2000 wine from a $20 wine, and people tend to ascribe different values to the same wine poured to multiple glasses.
I suspect a lot of the same here.
Hint: the Ford has a gun rack in the rear window;the Bugatti has a V-16.
For instance, take a major scale played by a monophonic synthesizer of some kind. I know that a major scale in 12-tone equal temperament differs substantially from a major scale in just intonation. (The thirds and sixths are all off in various directions by about 13-15 cents.) I know that if I play such an instrument in equal temperament I'll get bored/annoyed with it sooner. At the same time, if I listen to a major scale in equal temperament and just intonation, I probably won't be able to tell you which one is which even though I know they're quite different. (In a chord the difference is much more obvious.)